Lili slaps her computer shut. “Wait!” she shouts. “Fuck it, I’m coming.”
“No, yeah, my favorite movie isThe Wolf of Wall Street, it’s such a blunt, unflinching portrayal—Scorsese really just looks into the American soul, you know?”
Wincing, Lili drains her drink.
If she has to start her Friday night listening to second-year analysts mansplain derivatives and trading options, she’s within her rights to fleece them of outrageously expensive cocktails and consider it retributive justice for the subprime mortgage crisis and credit discrimination on behalf of the proletariat.
The bar is bustling with its usual type. Company-branded Patagonia vests, vodka sodas, too-shiny Hublots, and “I’ve got a table at Tao later, you should come with.”
While Amina stalled their Uber back at the apartment, Lili had slipped into a tiny black dress, all loose silk, that she’d found thrift shopping last month, tucked away her septum piercing, and slid her feet into strappy heels.You can’t wear combat boots,Jackie protested.You’ll terrify the poor boys.
Now, her friends are somewhere in the packed crowd. She’d come over to the bar to get another drink, predictably finding men more than willing to pay for it.
“—it’s really an art, shorting stocks. Balancing the right intel with the right leverage.” It’s the blond guy of the group of analysts clustered around her. Charlie? Christopher?
“Wow,” Lili says. She scrunches up her nose. “But, like, how does that even work? Can you ‘long’ a stock, too?” Adds a giggle for emphasis: silly girl, empty head, no master’s degree in economics in sight. It’s easy, almost embarrassingly so. Stroking their egos, biting her lip when they explain a particularly difficult-to-grasp concept.
“Actually, yeah. It’s tricky to understand,” one of the taller ones cuts in—John? Josh? “Essentially, if I borrow apples from you at a dollar, then I sell them to Matt—”
As he regales her with an explanation she’d use for kindergartners, she glances at the time on her phone. A little longer, until James returns to work. Then they can flee this finance crowd and meet the rest of their friends.
She’d like to get fucked tonight, she thinks, looking over the bar.
She’d like to be forced hard into her body and out of her mind. She’d like to struggle, pinned down until the relentless buzz of her thoughts is smothered away: the unanswered text, her thesis work, the horizon past graduation next year inching closer, uncertainty and instability rushing in again, as always. She wants it all to stop for a moment; she wants silence that gives her breathing room. But she knows she’ll likely only be disappointed by what she finds tonight.
When the boy hasn’t spoken for a beat, Lili screws up her face into a practiced pout of confusion. “But how do you know the stock price is going to go down?”
Behind her, a dark huff of laughter. She frowns, looking sharply over her shoulder.
“Is there an issue?” she asks the man standing at the bar behind her.
Fuck.
He’s—gorgeous.
Tall, broad shouldered, and lithe, with thick black hair and patrician features: high cheekbones and an elegant, straight nose. Strong jaw, close-cropped beard, and lips tugged into the hint of a smile, with intelligent, dark eyes. He’s wearing a black suit, no tie, shirt collar crisp and starched against his neck. The first few buttons of his shirt are undone.
“The ‘explain short selling to me’ bit is played out, no?”
British. Clear, educated syllables. A hint of warmth, roughness polished underneath.
“I’m not sure what you mean,” Lili snaps.
It’s a busy bar, but the man gestures at the bartender—a gleam of cuff links—who’s over in a second. “It was overused in my day, but I’m glad to see it’s still proving profitable. Cognac, over ice,” he tells the bartender.
“Right, if you’re done,” she says, turning back to the analysts and finding them gone. They’ve slunk into the crowd. One of them shoots a furtive look at—not her, but the man beside her.
She frowns.
Another low laugh. The ice in his drink clinks against the glass. It makes her stomach tense.
“Probably for the best. I didn’t think you wanted to go home with someone living in a flex space in Murray Hill, anyway. Let me buy you a drink.”
“One drink,” she says, willing stern warning into her voice. Unsure if it’s directed at herself or him. “Are you going to try and explain shorting to me?”
He grins, teeth gleaming in the dim light.
“Only if you ask nicely.”
